Step 2: Set Goals — 7 Steps to Successful Social Media Marketing

Last week Creative Blend Design introduced our new blog series, 7 Steps to Successful Social Media Marketing, beginning with Step 1: Research. Today, we’ll discuss step 2, one of the most important steps in any marketing plan: Setting Goals.

Step 2: Set Goals

Goals can help provide a number of benefits for your business and social media strategy. Once you set goals, they help focus attention on your target. Goals can help energize you and your staff – higher goals serve to induce greater effort, where as low goals induce lower effort. Goals affect persistence, constantly moving forward to achieve the goal. And goals help activate cognitive knowledge and strategies that help you cope with the situation at hand.

Mission Statement

For social media, each account and platform should have a clear mission statement. You may find that different platforms have certain advantages and disadvantages in communicating and executing your mission. For instance, Instagram may be ideal to showcase your product line or service but it may not facilitate the easiest engagement with your audience. It also has the limitations of not allowing hyperlinks to your site directly from posts. Therefore, your mission statement for your business’s Instagram account may simply be to reinforce customer satisfaction and showcase images of customers using your product or service. This can be done through photos and images you have taken or reposting your customers’ photos. You may even decide not to use Instagram at all and focus on other platforms that make more sense for your business. Use this time to reevaluate which social media platforms are best for your business – not only for communicating with your audience, but also executing your mission and goals.

Define a Precise Goal

When it comes to establishing social media accounts for your business, you should define a precise goal. This allows you to better measure your success. Your social media strategy should mirror or compliment your existing marketing goals and objectives.

You may ask, how do I choose my goals for my social media strategy?

There are a number different methods you can apply to set goals, including OKRs (Objectives & Key Results), Locke & Latham’s 4C F (Clarity, Challenge, Complexity, Commitment & Feedback) and S.M.A.R.T. We’ll focus on the S.M.A.R.T., one of the most popular and easy to understand goal setting methods for businesses.

S.M.A.R.T. provides 5 criteria as a guide for setting your goals:

S – Specific – your goal should target a specific objective for improvement or development

M – Measurable – your goal must be measurable in some way or fashion to indicate progress and success

A – Attainable – set goals high, but make sure your goals are realistic and attainable

R – Relevant – your goal should be relevant to your business and help achieve your overall marketing objectives

T – Time-bound – your goal should have a timeline for when it should be accomplished.

Start with a simple idea: increase brand awareness and reach. Translate that to your Facebook social media objective: increase the number of page likes on Facebook. Apply the S.M.A.R.T. criteria:

Be specific, what is the goal you are trying to achieve and how will you do it? Increase the number of page likes on Facebook by creating original content tailored to our audience, running periodic promotional contests, and utilizing paid ads to reach prospective audience.

Is the goal measurable, what metrics will you use? Measure Page Likes in Facebook Insights to gauge progress and success.

Is the goal attainable? If you are starting with 1000 current page likes, setting a goal of 1 million likes is not very realistic. Start with doubling your page likes from 1000 to 2000 page likes.

Is the goal relevant to your overall business objective? Yes, increasing page likes will help increase brand awareness and reach, as well as help position your brand in the consumer’s mind.

What is your timeframe for achieving your goal? Give yourself a timeline, such as 3 months to achieve your goal.

The resulting goal will be something like this: Increase brand page likes on Facebook from 1,000 to 2,000 in three months by creating original content tailored to our audience, running periodic promotional contests, and utilizing paid ads.

At the end of your timeline it will be time to evaluate your goal, measure its effectiveness and determine your success. Remember, just because you may not reach your goal, it doesn’t mean you have failed. Take your results and learn from them. What is working? What isn’t working? How can you do better in the future?

Other examples of goals include: increasing user engagement, boosting sales, acquiring new client leads, directing traffic to your website, increasing referrals, or increasing post-purchase satisfaction (diminishing buyer’s remorse). Keep in mind, these goals may apply to a single social media account or several of your accounts. Set your goals based on your business needs, however, the more precise your goal and mission, the greater chance you have at implementing a successful social media strategy.

Once you establish your goals you will need to start implementing your social media plan. We will discuss branding and how important that is to your overall plan in our next blog.

Is your business having trouble finding the perfect social media marketing strategy? Creative Blend Design will help you define a strategic plan that makes sense for your business. Please call us at (844) 223-8326 or click here to use our contact form.